I log into ones of these everyday for work. Still running OpenVMS.

I also need to log into some Sparc 5 that are running older litho tools in the factory.

I have a NY Times account and accually read the whole atricle.

There is no data in the article to support the summary, and it is mostly a fluffy Biographical piece about a great particle physicist who isn't 100% convinced that global warming will be that bad that hard to fix.

This whole discussion has been blown way out of proportion.

Here is one more, I did several boards with them when I was in college, their customer service was very helpful with my first board.

http://www.4pcb.com/

I was wondering the same thing, VMS is great. Its still heavly used in Manufacturing and Military systems. The only reason we have any PCs inside of our factory is to function as terminals.

As someone who works in semiconductors in the USA I would answer your question with its a little bit of all of these.

As for labor in a modern factory there are very few line operators but the TSMC equivenent of my Engineering position gets paid a whole lot less than I do and if your process is complex enough you will still need process and equipment engineers as stuff will always break.

Marerial costs can come down a little bit, especially if your location has really cheap electricity and reasonably clean water nearby.

Environmental compliance is a pretty big item as well. Fabs are basically giant toxic waste dumps the less you need to clean up the acid waste before it goes down the sewer the cheaper it is.

IP is possibly the scariest part for Intel, but TSMC was already offering 45nm products so the node that the Atom is built on is already pretty common in foundries, also TSMC has a very good reputation for building partnerships.

I think you last point is the possibly the biggest reason for Intel's move. An empty fab is a cash sink and TSMC has seen their orders plummit as most of their customers who have their own fabs (that they intend to keep) are canceling their orders with them to keep their own fabs more full even if it costs more to make a wafer in house. When a state of the art Litho Tool cost 50+ Million for one of them, if you bought them you need to keep them running to have a reasonable ROI. And if you close your fab this 50 Million will not fetch anywhere near 5 Million on the open market.

I have heard that even as early as November 08 TSMC was offering to make us wafers for 60% of what we were paying at the time I can only imagine that it has come down even from there.

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Virtualization

Check this out, it is not a emulator.

A quick check of the user manual states hosting a 64-bit OS requires 64-bit hardware. So I think you are out of luck.

This update is really just adding support for running 64-bit on systems where the host OS is not taking advantage of 64-bit hardware they already have.

Sadly you are probably right TFA shows that Vista SP1 was worse than RTM.

Vista SP1 has a slower boot time by 4 seconds, 14.7 fewer points on the PassMark, 45 Fewer points on PCmark, and 503 fewer in Cinebench from the RTM.

I know it is cool to try out different OSes from time to time, but is there really any solid technical reason why anyone would choose solaris on a laptop over linux?